We’re not fortune-tellers. Heck, we’re not even shiny, fancy corporate consultants with cool jackets. But we are looped into the world of tech and finance by sheer virtue of being CFO reporters, and as such, we have sooooome insight into the tech happenings CFOs should pay attention to in 2025.
But just in case you’re all “TL;DR,” we’ve got two words: Musk and AI.
Musk love DOGE. There’s already a main character in the tech world in 2025, and we regret to inform you he loves middle school humor and unfortunately shaped trucks.
There will be no escaping Elon Musk next year.
Not when he’s co-leading the Department of Government Efficiency. Not when TikTok’s CEO is going straight to Musk for insight, and considers him a useful link to the Trump administration, per the Wall Street Journal. And here’s the big one: Not when all his former tech rivals now stand to face his personal wrath.
Musk has cozied up to incoming President Trump; the Wall Street Journal noted that Musk “has rarely left Trump’s side since the election,” and means itliterally: He’s been sleeping at Trump’s Florida club, Mar-a-Lago. In the weeks since the election, the Journal said he’s joined Trump’s calls with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai.
Musk has some form of beef with most major tech players, including OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, and Bill Gates. It’s highly possible that Musk will wield his new influence within the Trump administration in ways that impact his tech rivals, particularly when it comes to AI regulation.
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This is why we’re not in the prediction business. In any case: Musk will be unavoidable in tech in 2025.
What’s in a name? And while we’re on the topic of big names and behemoths, there’s another tech power player that’s going to have to fight a little harder than usual to hold onto its title in 2025.
Nvidia has been synonymous with the AI boom of recent years. That’s not changing anytime soon, but competition is finally becoming tighter as the technology begins to advance.
“The shift is being driven by an array of tech companies—from large competitors such as Amazon and AMD to smaller start-ups—that have started tailoring their chips for a particular phase of AI development that is becoming increasingly important,” the New York Times noted. The aforementioned phase, called inference, is particularly costly, but it’s also what makes AI valuable in the first place: It’s the proof that a given AI model can actually make predictions or solve tasks.
“The real commercial value comes with inference, and inference is starting to gain scale,” Cristiano Amon, CEO of Qualcomm, told the Times. “We’re starting to see the beginning of the change.”
However, on the flip side, there are signs that LLMs may have run out of training sources and may be hitting a plateau.
Even if that’s true, it’s safe to predict we’ll be talking about GenAI a lot in the coming year.